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CALL TO DROP THE CHARGES AGAINST NICK TILSEN BEFORE JANUARY 26, 2026
In 2022, an incident took place where a Native unhoused relative was being harassed and assaulted by Rapid City Police (RCPD) in Rapid City, South Dakota. Nick Tilsen, CEO and Founder of NDN Collective, pulled over to conduct a routine cop watch. One officer accused Nick of assaulting him despite no physical contact being made with the officer. During the interaction, Nick remained in his vehicle because he felt unsafe surrounded by several police cars. Nick communicated with an officer, who then got approval from someone off-site and allowed Nick to leave.
Despite no immediate action being taken at the time, more than a year later, the officer involved accused Nick of attempting to run him over, leading to a complaint and warrant for Tilsen’s arrest being filed on June 30, 2023 – the same day NDN Collective announced they would host a July 4th March Towards Justice.
Nick was originally charged with aggravated assault and obstruction of a police officer. But just a few weeks before the trial date (January 12, 2026), Nick was notified that the Pennington County Grand Jury added a “simple assault” to the list of charges.
Nick is being systematically targeted as local prosecutors intentionally sought out the police officer named in this case and encouraged him to press charges. The charges brought against Nick are false and inflated to criminalize, silence, and ultimately isolate him from his community through imprisonment. Nick is being targeted by RCPD because he has unapologetically stood on his values and has called for accountability and justice for people harmed by police in Rapid City.
NDN Collective has been pushing for a federal investigation into the Rapid City Police Department for over 3 years. This fight is bigger than just Nick Tilsen. It’s about protecting movement leaders, movement organizations, our right to free speech, and to demand justice for those harmed by colonial white supremacist systems and structures.
NDN Collective believes this to be a politically motivated effort to silence a movement leader by criminalizing his actions and misusing the legal system. If found guilty of these charges, Nick could face up to 26 years in prison.
Nick’s trial is set to begin January 26, 2026, at 9 am MT at the Pennington County Courthouse in Rapid City, SD.
As we see continued targeting of movement leaders, including Nick, we need your support to continue fighting these legal battles. Trials are expensive and are tactics used to drain movement resources. We need resources to continue this fight against legal repression and to continue our work.
This fund safeguards our organization against legal attacks aiming to suppress our leaders, imprison our people, and obstruct our movement’s objectives.
DONATE TO NDN LEGAL FUND HERE:
https://ndnlegalfund.org
SIGN PETITION: DROP THE CHARGES:
Support for the charges against Nick to be dropped is clear, with over 16,500 signatures on a petition to the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s office. If you haven’t already, please add your name to our petition:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTdap1GFD-1/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Alex Jeffrey Pretti Knew He Wanted to Help Others
Shot and killed by immigration agents on a Minneapolis street, he wanted to be a ‘force of good in the world.’
By Corina Knoll, Julie Bosman and Maia Coleman, Corina Knoll reporting from Minneapolis, Jan. 24, 2026
The man fatally shot by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis was Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, officials said.
Mr. Pretti, who was 37, was a registered nurse who worked in the intensive-care unit at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, according to interviews and public records, and lived in an apartment in Minneapolis a short drive away from where he was killed.
He had a firearms permit, required by state law in Minnesota to carry a handgun, officials said.
Colleagues and acquaintances of Mr. Pretti were stunned by his death, recalling a friendly neighbor and hardworking professional who was devoted to his patients.
Dr. Dimitri Drekonja said that the two had worked together for years. Mr. Pretti was capable, competent and friendly, he said, the kind of person who cared deeply about his work and his patients.
“He was a really great colleague and a really great friend,” he said. “The default look on his face was a smile.”
The two chatted regularly about mountain biking, one of Mr. Pretti’s passions.
Family members of Mr. Pretti declined to comment on Saturday. Michael Pretti, Mr. Pretti’s father, told The Associated Press that he had warned his son to be careful in Minneapolis.
“We had this discussion with him two weeks ago or so, you know, that go ahead and protest, but do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically,” Michael Pretti said. “And he said he knows that. He knew that.”
Mr. Pretti received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 2011, a spokeswoman said. He graduated from a high school in Green Bay, Wis., in 2006, and was listed on the honor roll in a local newspaper. His parents now live in Colorado, and his former spouse lives in California.
A next-door neighbor, Jeanne Wiener, said she believed Mr. Pretti lived alone with his dog, but saw him walking frequently, and would speak with him several times a week.
Standing in her home, Ms. Wiener said she was shocked to hear of his death.
“We talk over the fence all the time,” she said. “He’s the sweetest, kindest, most unoffensive, most nonviolent person you’d ever want to meet.”
Ruth Anway, who worked with Mr. Pretti, described him as a passionate colleague and kindhearted friend with a sharp sense of humor.
Ms. Anway, a nurse, said she first met Mr. Pretti around 2014 when he was a research assistant at the hospital. She said she had encouraged him to pursue nursing.
“He really thrived in that environment,” she said in a phone interview on Saturday. “He wanted to be helpful, to help humanity and have a career that was a force of good in the world.”
In his free time, she said, Mr. Pretti loved to bike the trails around Minneapolis, and spent time with his dog, Joule.
Ms. Anway said Mr. Pretti followed the news closely and cared deeply about social justice and fighting for fairness.
“I’m not surprised he was out there protesting and observing,” she said.
Aasma Shaukat, a physician at the V.A. who worked with Mr. Pretti, said she had hired him to his first job in the research department at the hospital.
Mr. Pretti, then fresh from college and in his early 20s, had come to her with no medical training, but a deep drive, she said.
“He was your typical struggling young person with a lot of ambition, but no direction yet,” she said. “But he knew he wanted to help people in some way or another.”
Mr. Pretti spent the next few years working for Dr. Shaukat, assisting on medical studies and enrolling patients — while delivering pizzas at night to make ends meet.
The last time they spoke, Mr. Pretti had been working extra shifts as a nurse, saving up to buy a home and a new car.
“He was happy, and I was happy for him because his life was just starting,” she said. “This feels so senseless and just so wrong.”
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2) Timeline: A Moment by Moment Look at the Shooting of Alex Pretti
By Bora Erden, Devon Lum, Helmuth Rosales, Elena Shao and Haley Willis, Jan. 24, 2026
Mr. Pretti filming the scene 48 seconds from shooting in the foreground on the right. Immigration agents in the background close to the car on the right. Still from video shared with The Times. The New York Times
Federal agents shot and killed a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, at about 9 a.m. Central time on Saturday morning. A video shared with The New York Times by an eyewitness and her lawyer, as well as other video footage posted on social media, documents the violent scene, where agents appear to fire at least 10 shots in a span of only five seconds.
The footage seems to contradict the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the event, which the agency said began after the victim approached the federal agents with a handgun and the intent to “massacre” them.
48 seconds before shooting
Videos show a small group of civilians standing in the middle of a street where a person has recently been detained on the ground; the civilians are speaking to federal agents. Mr. Pretti appears to be filming the scene, and he walks closer to the federal agents while holding his phone.
25 seconds before
Leading up to this moment, one agent shoved two people away from a D.H.S. vehicle and into the street. Mr. Pretti attempted to put himself between the D.H.S. agent and the two civilians, and the agent pushed one of them to the ground. The video shows the same agent squirting pepper spray in the direction of Mr. Pretti’s face. (This agent will later fire shots at Mr. Pretti.)
Mr. Pretti is holding his phone in one hand, and he holds his other hand up to protect against the spray.
17 seconds before
Several agents grab at Mr. Pretti, who is still holding his phone. Additional agents approach and attempt to pin Mr. Pretti to the ground.
11 seconds before
Mr. Pretti is surrounded by a group of seven agents, some of whom have wrestled him to the ground. One of the agents, who wears a gray coat, begins to approach the fray with empty hands and grabs at Mr. Pretti, while the other agents hold him down on his knees. At the same time, another agent strikes Mr. Pretti repeatedly with a pepper spray canister.
1 second before
The agent in the gray coat appears to pull a gun from near Mr. Pretti’s right hip. He then begins to move away from the skirmish with the recovered weapon.
At the same time, another agent unholsters his firearm and points it at Mr. Pretti’s back.
First shot fired
The agent in the gray coat removes the weapon, which matches the profile of a gun D.H.S. says belonged to Mr. Pretti, from the scene. Then, while Mr. Pretti is on his knees and restrained, the agent standing directly above him appears to fire one shot at Mr. Pretti at close range. He immediately fires three additional shots.
Additional shots fired
Several agents have moved away from Mr. Pretti, who has collapsed. Another agent — the same one who shoved the civilians into the street and pepper-sprayed Mr. Pretti — unholsters his gun and fires at Mr. Pretti. The first agent also fires additional shots. Together, they fire six more shots at Mr. Pretti while he lies motionless on the ground.
At least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds. By the moment of the 10th shot, the agent who had moved away with the recovered weapon has crossed the street.
Mr. Pretti is the second person to have been shot and killed by a federal agent in Minnesota in recent weeks. Footage of Mr. Pretti’s death in Minneapolis was posted to social media almost immediately after the shooting.
The Homeland Security Department said that the episode began after a man approached Border Patrol agents with a handgun, and that an agent fired “defensive shots.” Another incident in Minneapolis this month, in which a Venezuelan man was shot in the leg by a federal agent, was also characterized as “defensive” by the department.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota disputed the claims by federal officials that Mr. Pretti had posed a threat. He accused “the most powerful people in the federal government” of “spinning stories and putting up pictures.”
Brian O’Hara, the chief of the Minneapolis Police Department, said that Mr. Pretti was an American citizen with no criminal record, and that he had a valid firearms permit. Under Minnesota law, citizens can legally carry a handgun in public, without concealment, if they have a permit.
Large crowds of protesters continued to gather throughout the day at the site of Mr. Pretti’s shooting. Later in the day, Mr. Walz authorized the deployment of the Minnesota National Guard, who will wear neon reflective vests to differentiate themselves from federal agents.
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3) What We Know About a Second Fatal Shooting by Federal Agents in Minneapolis
Investigators believe at least two agents shot and killed a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident on Saturday, the city’s police chief said.
By Rylee Kirk, Published Jan. 24, 2026, Updated Jan. 25, 2026
Federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday fatally shot a 37-year-old man, the second person to be shot and killed in the city during protests against a ramped-up immigration enforcement effort by the Trump administration, the authorities said.
The authorities have yet to formally name the man shot dead by federal agents. But colleagues and a senior law enforcement official identified him as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a registered nurse with no criminal record.
Mr. Pretti’s killing prompted more protests in Minneapolis, where tensions between residents and federal agents have run high over raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. In early January, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, 37, an unarmed U.S. citizen.
Trump administration officials have defended the shooting of Mr. Pretti, as they did the shooting of Ms. Good. But videos of the encounter and the moments preceding it, analyzed by The New York Times, appeared to contradict the federal government’s narrative.
Here’s what we know:
Who was killed?
Mr. Pretti, 37, worked in the intensive-care unit at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, according to interviews and public records. Those who knew him described him as a devoted colleague and friendly neighbor who closely followed the news.
“He was your typical struggling young person with a lot of ambition, but no direction yet,” said Aasma Shaukat, a V.A. physician who worked with Mr. Pretti. “But he knew he wanted to help people in some way or another.”
Mr. Pretti graduated from a high school in Green Bay, Wis., in 2006. He later received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 2011, a spokeswoman said.
Brian O’Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, confirmed at a news conference that the person who was shot was a 37-year-old man who lived in Minneapolis and was an American citizen.
The man had no criminal record and had a permit to carry a gun, Chief O’Hara said. Minnesota law allows citizens with a permit to carry handguns in public without concealment.
What happened in the encounter?
The Department of Homeland Security said the episode began after a man “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun” and they tried to disarm him. Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, accused him of “domestic terrorism.”
But a New York Times analysis of videos filmed at the scene suggested that Mr. Pretti had been holding a phone, not his gun, in his hands when he was tackled by federal officers.
Videos of the encounter on Saturday suggest that it began after a small group of protesters — including Mr. Pretti — had gathered near federal agents operating in Minneapolis. Similar scenes have become common across the country as opponents of the Trump administration’s immigration policies have rallied against raids by ICE and other federal agencies.
One of the agents began shoving the demonstrators, deploying pepper spray in their faces, video showed. Mr. Pretti, who was holding up his phone, moved to help one of the protesters who had been sprayed before several agents tackled him to the ground.
Several seconds after Mr. Pretti was on the ground, agents yelled that he had a gun. One of the officers then pulled what appeared to be a firearm out of the group. The agents appeared to be holding Mr. Pretti with his arms pinned near his head, firmly under control.
Chief O’Hara said investigators believe that at least two agents opened fire. At least 10 shots appeared to have been fired at Mr. Pretti within five seconds, according to the Times analysis of video footage.
Speaking at a news conference Greg Bovino, the official in charge of President Trump’s Border Patrol operations, said the agents had been conducting a “targeted operation” searching for a man accused of domestic assault and other charges.
The person who was shot was not the target of the operation, Mr. Bovino said. It was unclear if the federal officers ultimately found the suspect they were searching for.
Who is investigating?
Federal authorities said the Department of Homeland Security would lead the investigation into Mr. Pretti’s shooting. But Ms. Noem has already issued a full-throated defense of the officers involved, saying Mr. Pretti most likely intended to “kill law enforcement,” without providing evidence.
Mr. Pretti’s death appeared poised to become part of a broader legal battle over whether state officials can hold federal officers to account amid the Trump administration’s immigration clampdown.
Minnesota officials say the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension will lead a separate investigation that could lead to state charges.
But the Department of Homeland Security initially blocked state agents from examining the scene of the shooting, said Drew Evans, the bureau’s superintendent. Minnesota officials were also blocked from accessing evidence and pursuing an investigation into Ms. Good’s death.
Despite being denied access, the Minnesota bureau is talking with witnesses and seeking video, Mr. Evans said at a news conference on Saturday.
Devon Lum, Haley Willis, Corina Knoll, Julie Bosman, and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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4) Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis
What I saw, as federal agents stormed the city and residents banded together to protect themselves, was a dark, dystopian future becoming reality.
By Charles Homans, Photographs by Philip Montgomery, Jan. 25, 2026
Charles Homans, who is from Minnesota, is a political correspondent for The Times. He spent 10 days in and around Minneapolis observing clashes between federal agents and city residents and interviewing immigrants, activists and the mayor.
Charles Homans, who is from Minnesota, is a political correspondent for The Times. He spent 10 days in and around Minneapolis observing clashes between federal agents and city residents and interviewing immigrants, activists and the mayor.
Donald Trump’s most profound break with American democracy, evident in his words and actions alike, is his view that the state’s relationship with its citizens is defined not by ideals or rules but rather by expressions of power, at the personal direction of the president. That has been clear enough for years, but I had not truly seen what it looked like in person until I arrived in Minneapolis, my hometown, to witness what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge.
On Jan. 14, at 7:44 p.m., eight hours after I got to town, the City of Minneapolis’s official X account announced that there were “reports of a shooting involving federal law enforcement in North Minneapolis.” “Federal law enforcement,” as everyone by then knew, meant one of the 3,000 immigration agents fanned out across the metropolitan area, which Minneapolitans invariably called “ICE”: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the vanguard of the surge.
They had been there since December, ostensibly in relation to a fraud investigation that fell well out of their departmental purview and settled instead for what appeared outwardly as a more indiscriminate pursuit of potential immigration violations. The Minneapolis metro area is not big: Hennepin and Ramsey Counties — home to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, respectively, and many of their suburbs — are together less than one-fifth the size of Los Angeles County, the target of the administration’s first such immigration crackdown last year.
It is also home to a population of urban progressives who had thrown themselves into the task of tracking federal agents. The city had become a giant eyeball, every exercised citizen’s smartphone a sort of retinal photoreceptor for the optic nerve of neighborhood channels on the encrypted messaging app Signal, scanning public spaces for signs of ICE.
In the heightened atmosphere of the moment, the lines between documentation and confrontation had grown blurry. ICE officers, when they stuck around anywhere for more than a few minutes, were likely to be met by not just one or two camera-wielding observers but many, and observation inevitably turned into protest. The latent combustibility of these encounters was visible in the footage that bystanders had captured of an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, fatally shooting a resident, Renee Good, in her car on a snowy street in South Minneapolis on Jan. 7. That combustibility would be visible again in the fatal shooting on Jan. 24 of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old V.A. hospital registered nurse, by Border Patrol agents.
Shock over the violence of the deployment quickly gave way to redoubled anger. Within minutes of the city’s X post on Jan. 14, a crowd of perhaps a hundred people from all over the metro area had assembled at the location, in the Hawthorne neighborhood on Minneapolis’s north side, where, according to an F.B.I. agent’s affidavit, an ICE agent had shot an undocumented immigrant in the leg after being attacked with a broom during an arrest. When I arrived, several blocks were cordoned off with crime-scene tape, and milling around in the darkness beyond it were federal agents in balaclavas and tactical gear, most of them identified by their patches as members of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations unit.
The agents, in their masks and military-style kit, suggested a fierce omnipotence, but ICE and the other agencies have just as often been visibly unprepared to handle the policing situations their presence created in the city — or even the weather. Across the intersection, an agent slipped on the icy pavement and then fled, leaving an unsecured magazine full of live ammunition on the street, to the jeers of the crowd. Nearer to where I stood, an unmarked black Jeep Grand Cherokee was struggling to get clear of the crowd, escorted by a few officers on foot. “Get out of my [expletive] street!” someone yelled.
A woman in a fur-ruffed parka swung a plastic post at the rear windshield of the vehicle, which shattered with a dull crunch. It was not long before the air was alive with smoke grenades and sting balls and thick with tear gas. Faces peered out of second-floor windows along what had been, less than an hour earlier, a quiet residential street. “You killed Renee Good!” a man bellowed.
The atmosphere was strange and unstable for a street protest, missing some important steps of the usual choreography, and it took me a moment to realize why: I saw no police officers. I had passed a Minneapolis Police Department cruiser parked some distance down the street, but here, where the agents were clashing with the crowd, they were nowhere to be seen. The federal agents themselves looked more like a platoon of soldiers navigating a hostile foreign capital than conventional law enforcement in an American city.
For weeks, these agents had been actors in a kind of theater of power, meting out various forms of state force and violence, framed by the smartphone cameras they carried, providing a steady stream of content for the Trump administration’s various social media platforms. What was clear in person, seeing the scene outside of the frame, were the limits of this performance of power. The agents had no capacity to maintain order or much apparent interest in doing so. Their presence was a vector of chaos, and controlling it was not in their job description. All that was holding the crowd back, as far as I could tell, was the knowledge that an officer like these shot a woman a week earlier and that another shot a man up the street an hour ago. I left the scene that night certain it would happen again.
‘Take Out That Phone and Hit Record’
Tim Walz, Minnesota’s embattled governor, appeared live on camera from his official residence on the night of the second shooting and clash. He described the federal deployment to his state as an “occupation” and “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”
In his remarks, Walz implicitly affirmed what has been widely understood in America since at least the civil-rights-era confrontations over integration in the South, which is that the tools state governors have to formally resist the imposition of federal power in real time are extraordinarily limited. What Minnesota and every other state did have, though, was plenty of personal electronics. “Carry your phone with you at all times,” Walz advised the state’s residents. “And if you see ICE in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record.” The aim, he said, was to “create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans — not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
This sort of citizen surveillance of federal agents is a tactic that had spread widely — often with the support of Democratic officials like Walz — along with the immigration raids themselves, refined over the course of previous operations in Los Angeles and especially Chicago. As Walz suggested, it served a kind of double purpose: capturing evidence and also capturing the narrative, showing the world what Trump’s immigration crackdown looked like in practice.
Because of Minneapolis’s small size, the sledgehammer scale of the deployment and the extreme contempt that Minneapolitans had for it, ICE-watching had attained a manic intensity in some neighborhoods of the city, which became an exacerbating factor in the fog-of-war confusion and paranoia the raids brought to town.
One afternoon, I was idling in my rental car in the parking lot of a gas station where my friends used to buy cigarettes in high school when I heard a shrill chorus of whistles behind me — Minneapolitans, like Chicagoans last year, had distributed them widely and blew them en masse to alert people to ICE’s whereabouts. I got out to look around, only to see that the whistlers were pointing at me. It was the third time I had been mistaken for an ICE agent in the space of a week.
On the ICE-watchers’ heels was a pack of journalists, many of whom I knew from the expanding media circuit of the great American unraveling: militia rallies, Trump court appearances, protests against immigration raids in other cities. I reached out to shake the hand of a celebrated war photographer, but he retracted it, holding up his palms apologetically: “Mace,” he said.
They had just come from a clash in a nearby park between locals and Gregory Bovino, the camera-mugging senior Border Patrol official, who had been on the scene in Minneapolis personally for weeks, ducking in and out of the action, often dressed in a military-style greatcoat that invited, and received, Gestapo comparisons. Someone pulled out a phone to show me a video of Bovino minutes earlier, personally lobbing a green-smoke grenade at some protesters, with the jocular informality of a backyard barbecue host tossing a tallboy to a newly arrived neighbor. As they left, once again a federal agent dropped a magazine of live ammunition in the street. Officers from Bovino’s agency would shoot and kill Pretti less than a mile away three days later.
What was striking, and not a little chilling, when you watched videos like this as well as their public digestion on various social media platforms, was that they did not differ dramatically from the videos that the Trump administration disseminated itself. Nor did people on either side of the country’s chasmic ideological divide seem to disagree all that much about what they were seeing in the images of immigrants being marched away from their cars in subzero temperatures and demonstrators pepper-sprayed at point-blank range. These were pictures of the state deploying violence confidently and with open disinterest for the niceties of process or protocol — the expression of power as an end to itself. To some, it was horrifying; to others, it was exhilarating. To many city residents I talked to, the message of it all was clear enough: Nobody could help them. They were on their own.
“I’ve been telling people, if you want to really be prepared for stuff like this that’s going on in Minneapolis right now, you need to know your neighbors,” Steve Gagner, a resident, told me the day after Walz’s address. We were sitting at a coffee shop not far from Gagner’s house in South Minneapolis, an area that had become the heart of the local resistance to the federal deployment. The shop’s owner was running around directing pickups and drop-offs of boxed groceries and household necessities stacked by the door: donations for the thousands of immigrant families, undocumented and otherwise, that were known to be hiding out in their homes across the metro area for fear of arrest.
South Minneapolis might be thought of, in coastal terms, as roughly comparable to Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights or Los Angeles’s Echo Park: a historically diverse (by Minneapolis standards) and working-class area that was now the gravitational center of the city’s college-educated, progressive professional cohort, a neighborhood of social workers and graphic designers. Gagner, a longhaired 41-year-old who grew up in the suburbs, now lives in the city with two children and twice as many jobs: carpentry and handyman work, animation and jewelry design. He had made the earrings he was wearing, in the image of the Minnesota state flag, which had taken on an unexpected valence in recent weeks as a banner of defiance.
South Minneapolis was also where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in 2020. At the time, Gagner lived five blocks from the Third Precinct police station, where the officer, Derek Chauvin, was assigned; the first group of demonstrators had marched past Gagner’s house on the way to the station. “We were actually out there, clapping,” he said. Half an hour later, tear gas began wafting into the open windows. “And then,” he said, “everything erupted.”
The protests and rioting that followed Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, in which the Third Precinct building and a number of local businesses were burned down, were often depicted in the national media as occurring along racial lines, which was not quite right. They raged most furiously in largely white South Minneapolis, not the historically Black north-side neighborhoods like Hawthorne. Gagner had supported the protests and was highly critical of the Police Department, but he also did not particularly want his house to burn down.
He and others in nearby neighborhoods had formed ad hoc community-watch groups during the first days of the upheaval, and much of this informal infrastructure had been revived amid the current crisis. “I’ve seen a lot of the same people that stepped up before stepping right back into those roles,” Gagner said, though now people were using encrypted communications or staying offline entirely. “It’s also very different because this is” — his voice dropped to an incredulous whisper — “this is the government.”
Although the work they were doing was, in the current climate, clearly political, it felt strange to describe Gagner or anyone else I met who was involved in the rudimentary activities of the resistance as activists; most of their activities would, in any other circumstances, have seemed like the most uncontroversial kind of civic participation. Since the early days of the standoff, many people across the Twin Cities and their suburbs had joined neighborhood-level efforts, organized through Signal chats, to track the federal agents and had stood watch around locations — schools, apartment buildings, local businesses — they believed were particularly vulnerable.
But by mid-January, many of the people I talked to in South Minneapolis had decided it was more useful to focus on the targets of the raids, giving immigrant families’ children rides to school — federal agents in Minnesota and other states had been arresting parents during drop-offs and pickups — and delivering supplies to those who were afraid to leave their homes.
This work had become a point of contact between the area’s white progressives and Latino community institutions — in particular Dios Habla Hoy, a nondenominational evangelical church with a mostly Latino congregation, which had become a local hub of food deliveries. Since the federal raids began, the church’s Mexican American pastor, Sergio Amezcua, had emerged as a voice of defiance in the media. He was also a self-described conservative who voted for Trump in 2024.
Amezcua, who also owns insurance agencies, said that many Latino businesspeople he knew in Minneapolis had been supportive of Trump until the immigration crackdown. “A lot of our businesses were like, ‘I think Trump is the answer,’” he told me. “Believe me, 100 percent of them regret it.” (He said he did.)
Other response efforts were coordinated through parent-teacher organizations, particularly those of schools with large populations of Latino students. The school-based organizing, like the ICE-watching tactics, was a strategy imported from community networks in Chicago, where parents last year mobilized around so-called sanctuary schools. Particularly for parents of elementary-school-age children, who found themselves suddenly having to explain why parents were standing guard against federal agents around the school property and why their Latino classmates were staying home, their latent politics had been supercharged by a very parental mix of fear and fury.
A mother at another school in South Minneapolis, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid drawing further attention to the school, described coming upon ICE agents detaining the driver of a car, then taking him away along with the keys. Looking in the abandoned vehicle, she saw a woman in the front seat and a small child huddled in the back seat. “They just — take off,” she said, and she started sobbing. “They just walk away. They don’t care. It’s like — we’re all people.”
I asked her how she discussed what was happening with her own children. “We’re lying to them all the time,” she said. “‘You are not in danger.’ I don’t think they are, but we can’t guarantee that. Because they” — ICE — “are not following the rules. We’re white, but who knows? You look at them wrong, and they’re going to smash your window.”
‘Don’t Turn On the Lights’
One afternoon later that week, I drove out to a nondescript lower-income apartment complex in a Minneapolis suburb. A man in his 30s let me into the building and led the way up to an apartment on the third floor, then closed the door behind us.
The apartment was small, and it felt smaller with the windows covered. The man and his wife, both of whom asked not to be identified out of fear of arrest, had tacked up a blanket over one window and a floral-print sheet over the other, illuminated by the wan winter light outside. Their young daughters would try to peek out, but the parents would shoo them away from the windows. If anyone pulled back the sheet, they warned the girls, drones could see inside.
The man left the apartment only for the most furtive missions: to take out the trash, to move the car when snowplows came to clear the parking lot. It took him a moment to recall when he had last ventured farther than that. It was November, he thought. That was around the time that “the school,” he said, “let us know that the raids were happening.”
The building was home to a number of immigrants like the man, who said he came with his wife and their daughters several years ago from Ecuador. He said they had petitioned for asylum at the border. This was a legal process under which an increasing number of people had been admitted during the Biden administration. Some asylum applicants cited highly specific threats to their lives. Others made much broader claims, like this man, who said he and his family had come to the United States because of prejudice against the country’s Indigenous people and the escalating violence in the capital, Quito, where they lived. Peaceful as recently as six years ago, it had since become a battleground in a proxy war between Mexican drug cartels vying for control of Pacific-coast smuggling routes.
The family’s claim was still in process, the man said. In the meantime, he said he had been given a work permit and a Social Security number. In the summer, he cut lawns; in the winter, he cleared snow. But an administrator at his daughters’ school had warned him that he should be careful about working outside. He began watching the street from inside the apartment.
He noticed large S.U.V.s, Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows, idling outside the apartment complex for a few hours at a stretch. He took a picture of one of them and sent it to someone at the school. “They told us: ‘They’re ICE. Be careful,’” he said. “‘Cover the windows. Don’t turn on the lights. Don’t go out shopping. If you need anything, ask.’” That was nearly two months ago.
It had taken a week or two, after the man stopped going to work and everyone stopped leaving the apartment, for the food to run out. After days of eating only potatoes, the family appealed for help to their church. Soon volunteers began dropping off essentials in cardboard boxes.
At first the family kept the girls home from school. But after the school warned that such absences could result in legal action, the girls resumed going every other day, escorted by a teacher or an administrator.
The girls asked why they couldn’t otherwise leave the apartment, why they couldn’t buy food themselves, why they couldn’t look out the windows, and the man tried to figure out what to tell them. “I have told them that there are people out there looking for criminals,” he said. Like most of the immigrants I met in Minnesota and elsewhere who had been affected by the immigration raids or were living in fear of them, he had supported the idea of rounding up violent criminals in the United States illegally when Trump first spoke of it. And he assured his daughters that he was not a criminal himself. “But we’re not from this country,” he would tell them, he said, “and we have to be careful. Because they’re taking everybody.”
Although his wife couldn’t bring herself to mention it to the girls, lately the man had started trying to talk to them about what would happen if their parents were arrested. This was difficult in part because he himself did not know what would happen. When it became clear that the federal agents sweeping the city had no plan for the children the raids left behind, school staff members started quietly urging immigrant parents to sign a delegation of parental authority form, which would give someone else the power to make decisions over their children — a limited form of custody. But who could the man even ask to take on such a responsibility? His family’s relatives in Minnesota were all in the same position as he was.
His own closest encounter with ICE agents, he said, happened when he was moving the car and found himself at an intersection opposite a pair of large S.U.V.s with tinted windows. He sent his wife a voice message and then shrank into the seat, praying to God to make him invisible.
I asked the man how he knew the drivers at the intersection were ICE agents. “They were in two of those big trucks — the really big new ones that are driving around,” he said. Were they wearing masks? He didn’t know.
At some point, the paranoia in Minneapolis had created its own reality. The furtiveness and randomness of the documented raids was very real, but now half of Minneapolis and an ever-expanding press corps were driving around looking for federal agents, too, prowling streets and parking lots in ways that resembled the agents themselves, creating their own layers of rumor and confusion.
When I had first pulled into the apartment building’s parking lot, I saw an S.U.V. idling by the entrance, an iPhone visible against the windshield, filming me. When I got out and held up my press credential, the window rolled down to reveal two smiling white women who were out delivering food to people like the family in the apartment. “Sorry!” one of them said brightly.
Leaving the building an hour later, I saw two more large S.U.V.s slowly circling the lot. Were they ICE agents? Were they people watching for ICE agents? Who knew? Earlier that day, outside a church that was distributing aid, I overheard a young man on his phone reporting a “confirmed ICE” vehicle. I looked around for it, until I realized he was reading off the license plate from my rental car.
‘The Somalis Have Taken Over Your Neighborhoods!’
When Trump, hours after returning to the presidency last year, pardoned the participants in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, one beneficiary was Edward Jacob Lang, a 30-year-old from upstate New York who had spent several years in jail awaiting trial on 11 charges for, among other things, attacking a Capitol Police officer with a metal baseball bat. Lang, who goes by Jake, had parlayed his incarceration into a brand as a sort of political prisoner-influencer, though he did not seem to actually have much of a profile on the right; two years ago, I stopped by a protest on his behalf outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he was being held, and found it attended by fewer than 10 supporters. The people who most fervently followed him and his stunts — claiming to form a militia from inside jail, throwing Nazi salutes outside the AIPAC headquarters — seemed to be gullible and easily outraged liberals, along with the more shamelessly click-baiting reporters whose content they consumed.
As tensions in Minneapolis escalated, Lang announced he would be coming to town to lead a “CRUSADER MARCH on ‘Little Somalia,’” with the aim of burning a Quran outside Minneapolis City Hall on Jan. 17. The main, if unintended, effect of Lang’s announcement, besides stirring up the people who could be counted on to react to it, was to call attention to just how far Trump’s crackdown had drifted from its stated intentions. Trump initially said federal agents were coming to town in relation to the federal investigation of a several-billion-dollar fraud scandal involving the state’s social services, which had produced indictments of nearly 80 people, most of them members of the state’s Somali community — the largest Somali diaspora population in the country, much of it refugees who settled in Minnesota in the 1990s.
Trump, who had vowed to stop refugee flows to Minnesota during his 2016 campaign, had ranted against Somalis in December, calling them “garbage” in a cabinet meeting. But a majority of Minnesotan Somalis have U.S. citizenship, and by the time Lang came to town, the agents’ attention seemed to have largely shifted; the few arrests that D.H.S. publicly announced appeared to be mostly Latinos and Hmong immigrants.
“The Somalis have taken over your neighborhoods!” Lang shouted into a microphone as he marched through downtown. He was clad in a tactical vest that made him resemble the city’s new diaspora population of ICE agents; as right-wing influencers and law enforcement have embraced similar paramilitary gear and content-creation strategies, the lines that might have once distinguished them visually have grown sketchier. “These people are animals. Look at them! Look at them! Immigrant scum!”
When he got to City Hall, a crowd of perhaps several hundred counterprotesters was waiting for him. They leaned toward the most reliably bait-taking segments of the left-liberal spectrum, from the itinerant leftists leading chants for unrelated causes — “Free Palestine!” — with their own megaphones to older suburbanites holding up signs that read “LOVE ALWAYS WINS.” The South Minneapolis types I had been talking to throughout the week had been urging nonattendance.
I had wondered what a clash between whichever constituency Lang managed to mobilize — it was about 10 people — and an increasingly infuriated population would look like in a city where local law enforcement had been barely visible for days. Making my way through the crowd, I found Lang holed up in the well of a ground-floor window of City Hall along with a few others, gamely enduring the attacks of the crowd: an endless barrage of insults, a squirt gun that lashed him with gouts of freezing cold water and water balloons.
This was a move pioneered during Trump’s first term by more-enterprising right-wing influencers who, with video rolling, would place themselves in the path of particularly knuckle-headed anarchists in cities like Portland, Ore., and lean into their beatings with the verve of Italian soccer players. But there was, once again, something off about the way it was playing out in Minneapolis. I climbed onto a bench to get a better look, just in time to see Lang, who had jumped down from the window well, disappear into a sea of windmilling fists for several minutes, then emerge out the other side.
As the scrum surged in my direction, I joined the crush of people running after Lang, turning the corner past City Hall and bounding over a light-rail track. A man to my left turned and decked another man in the face. Both were wearing balaclavas and heavy coats; everyone was bundled up in so many layers of outerwear — the temperature was in the single digits — that the usual signifiers of political identities were impossible to make out. All anyone seemed to really know was that everyone was either chasing Lang or chasing the people chasing him, and that nobody seemed to be stopping anything; we had passed a single police cruiser idling alongside City Hall.
Lang made it several blocks, as far as the doorstep of the Hotel Indigo, before his pursuers caught up with him, knocked him down and began vigorously kicking him in the head. He managed to get to his feet and sprinted through the hotel bar with a few photographers in tow, crashing out a side entrance and into the back seat of a passing car, which a mob briefly waylaid in traffic before the vehicle managed to get free. (One of his rescuers, a transgender woman named Daye Gottsche, later told a local reporter that she had made it clear to Lang, as they drove him to safety, that she did “not support the type of man he is.”)
From the back of the crowd, it had been hard to follow exactly what was happening, and a number of demonstrators, believing Lang to be inside the hotel, lingered outside. Jody Carr, a retiree from the exurb Chaska, looked on from across the street with her daughter, a nurse. “I am disappointed in the people who’ve gotten violent, because that is not what this is about,” Carr told me. She had attended recent No Kings protests in Chaska; this was her first demonstration related to the ICE deployment. “I’m proud to be an American, but I’m not proud of what our administration is doing,” she said. One of her daughter’s co-workers, an American-born woman of Kenyan descent, had been stopped a few weeks before by ICE and thrown out of her car, she said — “in her scrubs on the way to work!”
Chaska sits on the far periphery of the Minneapolis metropolitan area, a politically mixed territory between the solidly Democratic metro area and Republican rural areas beyond. I asked Carr if there was disagreement about the deployment among the people she knew there, and she nodded.
“My niece told me I was a threat to humanity,” she said.
Just then, a van pulled up carrying a dozen Minneapolis Police Department officers in riot gear, arriving belatedly to disperse the crowd. Following a couple of bullhorn announcements about the impending use of chemical agents — after ICE, which fired them off with no warning, this seemed quaint — the demonstrators took an impromptu victory lap through the streets of downtown. A man with a drum led a call and response:
“Who protects us?”
“We protect us!"
I left the protest feeling numb: It seemed as if we had all come fairly close to seeing a man beaten to death in the street. I called Lang the next night to ask how he was doing.
“As good as a man who’s been ripped limb from limb by a pack of wild hyenas can be!” he replied cheerfully.
Lang was back on the East Coast already. He told me he was up for an interview, but only if we did it in the form of a video clip that I would guarantee The Times would publish, and that he would as well. “That’s usually the way that I’m leaning toward things now, because the video content is so important for dissemination on both our social media platforms,” he said. We would not copublish a video. I went to sleep feeling a little sheepish. Lang was going to be fine.
The content, as he surely knew, was exceptional.
‘Get Out of the City’
I went to meet Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis at Karmel Mall, a large and labyrinthine complex of Somali businesses on Lake Street in South Minneapolis, on the afternoon of Jan. 22. The location was his staff’s choice, and a pointed one. As we walked through the mall, it was largely empty, with most of the market stalls closed and locked down behind metal shutters, another picture of a city battened down in a storm. The Islamic afternoon call to prayer drifted from a speaker over a deserted hallway. In one of the few open stalls, he spotted a merchant he knew. “Osman!” he called out. The man greeted him with a hug. “You are winning,” he said.
Although Walz’s career had run aground amid the fraud scandal — he announced, amid Operation Metro Surge, that he would not be running for governor again — Frey, like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, had arguably benefited from the enemy-of-my-enemy politics the federal invasion foisted upon Minneapolis. Although he easily won re-election in November, many south-side progressives still grumbled about his support for the city’s Police Department during the George Floyd crisis, which had led to his heckling out of George Floyd Square during a visit to the memorial that June.
“I got spat on and shamed and booed,” he told me, tucking into a plate of goat and rice in the otherwise deserted food court. “But it was the right decision” not to defund the Police Department, he said. “And it’s the right decision now to tell ICE to get out of the city.”
Like other mayors and governors who had found themselves on the receiving end of Trump’s immigration raids, Frey — who, like Walz, is currently under investigation by Trump’s Justice Department for impeding the federal action — had responded with lawsuits and media appearances, projecting unequivocal defiance while carefully keeping city law-enforcement agencies out of the fray. When I brought up the Lang episode, he told me that the police, uniformed and not, were nearby, ready to intervene if necessary. “It had the potential to be a complete disaster, and it wasn’t,” he said.
This was true, but in the moment, that outcome had seemed to be luck as much as anything else; I hadn’t seen any officers around until well after the beating, I said. “They were there,” Frey insisted, “and they did run to help” Lang before he got away in the car. Lang, he pointed out, had not actually filed a police report about the assault.
Trump’s federal deployment in Minneapolis, like the others before it, was not only about immigration; it was also a kind of ritual disciplining of unruly liberals, a ripping away of the protections they had so long enjoyed and a demonstration of how little the politicians they elected could really do to stop it. This would be underscored two days later, hours after I left Minneapolis, when Border Patrol agents confronting neighborhood observers several blocks from Karmel Mall shot Pretti, repeatedly and apparently after first disarming him of a gun he was licensed to carry and was not holding, based on video footage.
At the mall, I asked Frey whether this display of power, and imposition of powerlessness, might undercut the credibility of the city government, the faith its citizens had — needed to have — in its ability to stand up for its citizens in material terms.
“What we’re seeing is exactly the opposite,” Frey replied. “We’re seeing people unite. We’re seeing people proud to work with police officers — people who have been extraordinarily critical of law enforcement,” he added. “The loudest critics are now the most vocally supportive.” It was only later that I realized he had turned the question to the citizens’ support for the city, not the other way around.
Only a couple of food vendors adjoining the food court were open, and when we arrived, Frey had stopped to commiserate with one of them, a young Somali man. “It’ll be like a light switch when ICE leaves,” he said. “It’ll be a celebration.”
“We’re going to have a big party,” the man said, hopefully.
Frey nodded. “People will be dancing in the hallways here.”
His promise echoed down the empty hall.
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5) G.O.P. Senator Cassidy Calls for Investigation of Fatal Minnesota Shooting
The Louisiana Republican, who is facing a primary opponent backed by President Trump, said there should be a joint state and federal inquiry into the shooting death of 37-year-old Minneapolis man.
By Catie Edmondson, Reporting from Washington, Jan. 25, 2026
Senator Bill Cassidy has faced accusations that he is not sufficiently supportive of President Trump. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who is facing a primary challenger backed by President Trump, called for a “full joint federal and state investigation” into the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis resident by federal agents.
Mr. Cassidy on Saturday night became the most prominent congressional Republican to condemn what was unfolding in Minneapolis, in a statement that called the fatal shooting of Alex Jeffrey Pretti “incredibly disturbing.”
“The credibility of ICE and D.H.S. are at stake,” Mr. Cassidy said. “There must be a full joint federal and state investigation. We can trust the American people with the truth.”
That is at odds with the approach of the Trump administration, which said the Department of Homeland Security would lead the investigation into the shooting and initially blocked Minnesota authorities from examining the scene of the shooting, according to a state official.
While Democrats in Congress have expressed outrage about the shooting and quickly said they could not support a spending deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security, most congressional Republicans, away from Washington for the weekend, have stayed quiet.
Mr. Cassidy’s comments were all the more striking because he is fighting for his political career amid accusations that he has been insufficiently supportive of Mr. Trump. The president has backed a primary challenger to Mr. Cassidy, who voted for an impeachment conviction of the president after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Another Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, has also called for an investigation into the shooting.
Representative Andrew Garbarino of New York, the Republican chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement on Saturday night that he had requested testimony from the heads of ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Mr. Garbarino did not mention Minneapolis in his statement, but said: “I take my oversight duties for the department seriously, and Congress has an important responsibility to ensure the safety of law enforcement and the people they serve and protect.”
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6) Trump is sending his border czar, Tom Homan, to Minnesota.
By Hamed Aleaziz, January 26, 2026
The decision to send Mr. Homan, a longtime veteran of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, came amid increased criticism of the D.H.S. operation in the state and its rushed response to the shooting of the man, Alex Pretti, who was pinned down by agents when he was killed.
“I am sending Tom Homan to Minnesota tonight,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Monday. “He has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there. Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me.”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, detailed Mr. Homan’s mandate in the state in her own post. “Tom Homan will be managing ICE Operations on the ground in Minnesota to continue arresting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” she wrote.
Mr. Homan has extensive ties at ICE. He led the agency’s deportation wing during the Obama administration, saying at the time that he supported its efforts to target serious criminals in the country illegally.
Years later, he was tapped to be the agency’s acting director during the first Trump administration. Mr. Homan, along with two other senior leaders, recommended a policy that led to the separation of families along the border in 2018.
As border czar, Mr. Homan has taken on a communications role. He often appears on television or holds gaggles with reporters outside the White House, spreading the message of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and offering public defenses of its tactics.
Running the operations on the ground has mostly been the responsibility of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, along with other agency leaders. including Gregory Bovino, who has overseen Border Patrol operations across the country.
Ms. Noem praised the decision to send Mr. Homan to Minnesota in a social media post. “This is good news for peace, safety, and accountability in Minneapolis,” she wrote.
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7) Alex Pretti’s Friends and Family Denounce ‘Sickening Lies’ About His Life
People who knew a man fatally shot by federal agents pushed back against what they called a smear campaign by federal officials. “He was a good man,” his family said.
By Talya Minsberg, Corina Knoll and Julie Bosman, Published Jan. 25, 2026, Updated Jan. 26, 2026
Talya Minsberg and Corina Knoll reported from Minneapolis. Julie Bosman reported from Chicago.
He was a calm presence amid hospital chaos. A mentor who taught kindness and patience to younger friends and colleagues. A singer with a knack for dancing. A bicyclist who treasured the beauty of Minnesota.
This weekend, the family, co-workers and friends of Alex Pretti, who was killed by immigration agents in a confrontation after he was apparently filming them, remembered his life, even as the circumstances of his death were debated on the national stage.
They shared photos of the Alex they knew: a smiling, bearded Mr. Pretti in the powder-blue scrubs he wore at his job as an intensive-care nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital, an outdoors lover posing with his mountain bike on a wooded trail and a student wearing a green cap and gown as he sang a solo at his high school graduation in Green Bay, Wis.
And they denounced what they saw as smear campaigns in the aftermath of Mr. Pretti’s death.
Within hours of the killing by federal agents on a Minneapolis street, Trump administration officials labeled Mr. Pretti a “would-be assassin” and asserted, with no evidence, that he had committed an act of “domestic terrorism.”
Through their own shock and grief, people who knew him struggled to rise above the lies and insults, they said, to describe who he was.
Rory Shefchek, a friend from high school who now lives in Madison, Wis., said that he hoped that Mr. Pretti would be remembered as the person he knew.
“He was a helpful, kind guy,” Mr. Shefchek said. “He was a confident, diligent and respectful person throughout his life. I hope that Alex’s story can catalyze change, as someone who believed in doing the right thing.”
Of the cellphone footage of Mr. Pretti’s death that has circulated widely in the news and on social media, Mr. Shefchek said, “We have all seen the video and our eyes don’t lie.”
Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, a colleague of Mr. Pretti’s at the VA hospital, was shaken when he heard that an immigration agent had killed a civilian in Minneapolis. It was awful, he said, even before he learned that the civilian was his friend.
“He was a happy guy,” Dr. Drekonja said. “When you asked him to do something, it would be done and it would be done right.”
Mr. Pretti, who was 37, was on the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic, and was always eager to help whoever needed an extra hand. He was the kind of nurse patients remembered, colleagues said, and he was a beloved mentor to nurses stepping into the intimidating environment of the intensive care unit.
As an ICU nurse, he was accustomed to people in crisis, said Elissa Todd, a colleague and friend. He was also trained in de-escalation, she noted. Ms. Todd said it was painful to see his last moments knowing personally how calmly Mr. Pretti was able to manage the chaos and stress that came with his job.
“Whatever conversation was being had, I cannot imagine he’s someone who would have made it worse,” she said, referring to his interaction with immigration agents in the minutes before he died. “He would have been someone who was being reasonable and thinking clearly.”
She paused, before saying “I can’t imagine what their last dialogue was, but I will say that he’s uniquely qualified to handle it with integrity and grace.”
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said on Sunday that he had spoken with Mr. Pretti’s parents, who live in Colorado. Mr. Walz said he was trying to channel their desire to tell the world who Mr. Pretti really was, a person who lived “a life of generosity” according to his family.
“Someone who went to work to care for veterans, someone who was a valued co-worker, someone who relished and lived in this state in a big way, whether it was outdoor activities or being down there on the street as a First Amendment witness to what ICE is doing to this state,” Mr. Walz said.
“If we cannot all agree that the smearing of an American citizen and besmirching everything they stood for and asking us not to believe what we saw,” he added, “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
Mr. Pretti’s family said in a statement on Saturday that they were heartbroken, but also “very angry.”
Mr. Pretti’s parents, Susan and Michael Pretti, in a statement reported by The Associated Press and CNN, called their son “a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital.”
“Alex wanted to make a difference in this world,” the statement said. “Unfortunately he will not be with us to see his impact.”
The family denounced the Trump administration’s response to the shooting, which included the accusation that Mr. Pretti had confronted immigration agents with the intent “to perpetuate violence.”
Federal officials have noted that Mr. Pretti had a gun with him during the confrontation, though he was licensed to carry the firearm and had not drawn the weapon. Videos show that Mr. Pretti was holding a phone, rather than his gun. An agent had disarmed Mr. Pretti just before he was shot.
Colleagues knew he was a gun owner, although he didn’t speak of it often, except in occasional conversations about gun reform.
“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting,” the Pretti family statement said. “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”
At Mr. Pretti’s apartment building on Saturday evening, neighbors on his block came together for a small gathering, lighting candles in the brutally cold Minnesota air.
As word of Mr. Pretti’s death spread among friends in Wisconsin, where he grew up, they swapped memories from decades ago — of Mr. Pretti dancing in the show choir in a tuxedo and performing in a production of “Guys and Dolls.”
JD Atkins, 36, remembers when he got his first big role in a play and Mr. Pretti calmed his nerves and offered to run lines together. It was not uncommon for younger students to see Mr. Pretti as a role model, he said, and Mr. Atkins credited him for influencing his career as a high school theater director and playwright near Milwaukee.
“We just really wanted to be like him, because he was cool without trying,” Mr. Atkins said. “And as an adult I realize, it’s because he was kind to everybody.”
Another classmate, Kevin McGillivray, recalled that Mr. Pretti seemed to exude a sense of justice even when it came to petty school interactions. Upperclassmen tended to pick on younger students, but Mr. Pretti never joined his peers. Mr. McGillivray said he and others looked up to Mr. Pretti as an older brother figure.
“He would step up and say something to them and encourage them to reconsider what they’re doing,” Mr. McGillivray, 35, said. “The feeling that I have when I remember him is just a deep sense of safety and confidence.”
When Heather Zielinski saw the video of a federal agent shooting a man on Saturday, she knew she recognized the person. It took her a minute to realize it was her friend of more than 10 years, Mr. Pretti.
“I saw him get wrestled down to the ground, and I saw his feet just go limp, and my heart sank into my stomach,” she said
Ms. Zielinski doesn’t think he would want to be known as a martyr. She thinks he would like to be remembered as a guy who enjoyed riding his bike, as someone who loved his family and as a person who cared about health care, science and research.
She described him as strait-laced, someone who got good grades in school and cared deeply about his job. He loved being outdoors, she said, and took a mountain biking trip to Utah and Colorado over the summer before competing in a cycling relay race in Milwaukee.
“He was a really good friend, and a really good man,” she said.
Jack Healy contributed reporting.
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8) This May Be the Only Path to Accountability for the Minneapolis Shootings
By Barry Friedman and Stephen I. Vladeck, Jan. 26, 2026
Mr. Friedman (N.Y.U.) and Mr. Vladeck (Georgetown) are law professors.
Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the wake of another fatal shooting by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, many people are wondering what can be done. The answer has been right in front of us all along.
Despite the incredulity with which some legal observers meet the idea, state and local prosecutors can prosecute federal officials for violating state criminal laws. Prosecutors should be gathering and securing evidence and seriously considering filing charges — sooner rather than later.
Not every prosecution will succeed, and all will face obstacles that are built into our legal system. But critically, bringing these state and local prosecutions could produce deterrent effects that are so desperately needed now.
U.S. law, at least theoretically, provides a range of options for holding government officers accountable; the problem is that many of those options are unavailable in practice where federal officers are concerned.
Consider, for instance, federal criminal prosecution — which should be an option for federal officers who commit murder. As recently as 2019, the first Trump administration told the Supreme Court that federal criminal prosecution would be the appropriate remedy in cases in which an officer used lethal force without justification.
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But the current administration didn’t investigate the Jan. 7 killing of Renee Good, and it has already stated that the Department of Homeland Security (which has no experience investigating law enforcement shootings) will run the investigation into the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti. A future president could potentially pursue charges for an offense — like the recent shootings of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti — that has no statute of limitations. But that assumes President Trump won’t first pardon the responsible officer(s).
What’s more, a series of decisions by the Supreme Court has made it all but impossible to hold federal officers liable for damages in federal lawsuits for violating our constitutional rights — such as in a February 2020 decision involving a Border Patrol agent who shot and killed an unarmed teenager without provocation.
Instead, the historical backstop for a lack of federal accountability, going all the way back to the founding, has been state law. States prosecuting federal officers for crimes committed in the course of their federal duties would certainly face complications, but those hurdles would not be insurmountable.
One such complication: The federal officer charged by state prosecutors for a crime committed while on duty could move any such case to a federal court. But that would simply change the courthouse (and the judge and the jury pool). State prosecutors would still be seeking to enforce state law — which, among other things, means that any conviction would not be subject to the president’s pardon power.
A second potential hurdle to clear: A federal officer defendant could argue that he’s entitled to what’s known as “Supremacy Clause immunity.” Vice President JD Vance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, have all claimed that this immunity is absolute, but they’re all wrong. As highly regarded (and conservative) former Judge Michael McConnell wrote on behalf of the Denver-based federal appeals court in 2006, “a federal officer is not entitled to Supremacy Clause immunity unless, in the course of performing an act which he is authorized to do under federal law, the agent had an objectively reasonable and well-founded basis to believe that his actions were necessary to fulfill his duties.”
In other words, the ability to prosecute federal law enforcement officers who commit state crimes in the course of their duties would turn on whether a reasonable officer in their position would have believed that their actions were necessary to fulfill their duties. That standard may be appropriately strict, to maintain federal authority when it is needed (think of federal protection for civil rights protesters in the 1960s), but at least based on the videos so many of us have seen, it should not be impossible.
Nor should state and local prosecutors think this power to bring charges under state law exists — or should exist — only when the offense results in a death. Every day, Americans are seeing an unending stream of videos showing federal officers destroying property, pepper-spraying individuals on a whim and using what at least appear to be excessive degrees of force. Many, if not most, of these acts are potential violations of state criminal laws. If those crimes are not “reasonable and well-founded” in light of federal duties, the officers can be convicted and penalized, even jailed.
What prosecutors should be doing now is what Minnesota prosecutors did after the murder of Renee Good: establishing online portals to which individuals can upload their videos and other evidence. Will there be a flood of evidence? Yes. Will it all justify prosecution? No. Will some offenders be charged? We can’t say for sure, but it looks to us like the answer ought to be yes, and that’s true even if the final result is not a conviction. (That, after all, is why we have trials and juries.)
If federal officers understood that they could and might well be held liable for outrageous conduct, they might think twice before engaging in it. The ultimate goal is bringing to justice those who have engaged in blatantly unlawful and unconstitutional conduct. But what is needed immediately — urgently — is deterring such conduct from happening going forward. Federal officers who are wearing masks to obscure their faces (and those who aren’t) must understand that they will be held accountable if and when they break the law.
We are arguing only for compliance with the Constitution. No one should disagree with that. As history teaches, that requires more than just the good graces of the executive branch.
In the future, a better solution would be for Congress to legislate a comprehensive and robust scheme of civil remedies for federal officers who break the law. But until and unless that happens, the alternative can’t be nothing.
And so it falls to state and local governments to build the record for criminal indictments in cases in which they are warranted — and to be the last line of defense for holding the federal government accountable, just as they’ve been since the founding.
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9) Remains of Last Captive in Gaza Are Retrieved, Closing a Chapter for Israel
The recovery of Master Sgt. Ran Gvili’s body paves the way for the next stage of the Gaza cease-fire plan, though the path forward is unclear.
By Isabel Kershner and David M. Halbfinger, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 26, 2026
Israelis gathered for Hanukkah on Sunday in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, some holding placards bearing the face of Master Sgt. Ran Gvili. Ilia Yefimovich/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli military said Monday that it had recovered the remains of Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, an Israeli police officer whose body was the last one held in Gaza. It was an important milestone for the Israeli public and cleared the way to the second phase of President Trump’s peace plan.
Sergeant Gvili was part of an elite police counterterrorism unit when he rushed into battle on Oct. 7, 2023, as Hamas led a surprise assault on southern Israel, setting off the two-year war in Gaza.
He was shot and wounded as he defended one of Israel’s border communities. He was then seized and taken to Gaza by militants from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an armed extremist group that joined in the attack, according to the Israeli authorities.
The Israel Defense Forces said it identified Sergeant Gvili’s remains after a focused search in an area of central Gaza that began over the weekend. The Israeli military said that it had notified Sergeant Gvili’s family that his body had been identified and that it would be returned for burial.
“With this, all hostages have been returned from the Gaza Strip to the State of Israel,” the military said in a statement.
The retrieval of Sergeant Gvili’s remains closes a painful chapter for Israelis, who have been gripped by the fate of the hostages taken during the attack. The militants abducted about 250 people to Gaza that day, most of them civilians. Many were released during two brief cease-fires, but dozens perished in captivity.
It also paves the way for the next phase of the cease-fire, though that is fraught with uncertainties, including the thorny question of whether Hamas will agree to disarm. Israel had insisted that Gaza’s border with Egypt would not reopen — part of the truce — until Sergeant Gvili’s body was returned.
Israel announced early on Monday that it would reopen the Rafah Crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip once it completed its search for Sergeant Gvili’s remains. The move would allow Palestinians who fled the enclave during the two-year war to return home for the first time.
Under the terms of President Trump’s cease-fire plan, which took effect on Oct. 10, all the remaining captives, alive or deceased, were supposed to have been released within 72 hours.
Twenty living hostages were returned quickly in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including 250 who had been serving life sentences for deadly attacks on Israelis.
The return of deceased captives to Israel was much slower. Hamas said it needed time and heavy equipment to retrieve some of the bodies, saying they were under rubble after two years of bombardment. Each of the bodies of 28 captives in Gaza was exchanged for the bodies of 15 deceased Gazans.
Israel accused Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad of intentionally dragging their feet over returning the remains.
It was unclear on Monday whether or to what degree either group had assisted in pinpointing the location of Sergeant Gvili’s remains. Israel said it had narrowed its search after collecting and refining intelligence on the matter.
Analysts said Hamas may have been trying to stave off the second phase of the cease-fire and, particularly, calls for the group to put down its weapons, which it regards as tantamount to surrender.
Hamas rebuffed Israel’s accusations, saying that, in Sergeant Gvili’s case, the location of his remains had been unknown and bad weather had hampered the search.
In any case, plans for carrying out the second phase of the deal have been vague. It calls for Hamas to hand over governing of the enclave to a technocratic committee of Palestinians and international experts, supported by an international stabilization force deployed in Gaza. But both parts of the plan have yet to take shape.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel brought Sergeant Gvili’s family to accompany him on his visit to the United States last month for meetings with Mr. Trump and administration officials.
After the meeting, Sergeant Gvili’s family said the two leaders had shown “genuine commitment” to securing the return of his body. They called for further pressure on Hamas to locate his remains and that the cease-fire must not move ahead without it.
“Time doesn’t heal my broken heart — it only reduces the chance of bringing Ran home,” Talik Gvili, Sergeant Gvili’s mother, said at the time.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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10) Israel Says It Will Reopen Gaza-Egypt Border, a Palestinian Lifeline, in Days
The Rafah crossing will open at the end of Israel’s search for the remains of the last captive in Gaza.
By David M. Halbfinger and Aaron Boxerman, David M. Halbfinger reported from Jerusalem, Jan. 26, 2026
The Rafah border crossing with Egypt in October 2023. Israel agreed to allow the crossing to reopen as part of the cease-fire deal struck in October. Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Israel has said that it will reopen the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt within days for travelers on foot, a move that would allow Palestinians who fled the enclave during the two-year war to return home for the first time.
Aid officials said they hoped that the reopening of the border crossing would also allow them to evacuate those in Gaza who need medical care abroad — thought to number more than 18,000 people, according to the World Health Organization.
In a social media post early Monday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that the border crossing, near the city of Rafah, would reopen after the completion of a search in Gaza for the remains of the last captive yet to be returned to Israel — whether that search was successful or not.
Israel agreed to allow the Rafah crossing to reopen as part of the cease-fire deal struck in October. But Israeli leaders demanded that Hamas first returned the remains of all deceased Israelis and foreign nationals in Gaza.
The latest announcement by the prime minister’s office appeared to lower the bar for the change at Rafah.
“The reopening of the crossing was conditioned upon the return of all living hostages and a 100 percent effort by Hamas to locate and return all deceased hostages,” the prime minister’s office said.
Israel did not say whether the search for the missing captive’s remains had been aided by Hamas.
A focused search began over the weekend for the body of the captive, Ran Gvili, 24, a police officer who was killed defending Kibbutz Alumim in southern Israel during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Israeli military said that it was searching an area in central Gaza, east of the so-called Yellow Line dividing Israeli-held and Hamas-controlled territory, based on newly refined intelligence about the body’s possible whereabouts. It said that specialized units and other personnel were on the scene, including dental experts and rabbis.
The Israeli decision to reopen the border — where both Israel and Egypt are expected to impose tight scrutiny over who crosses — advances the fragile cease-fire with Hamas. Yet the next steps for implementing President Trump’s plan for Gaza, which include disarming Hamas and deploying an international force there, are mired in uncertainty.
At least 100,000 Palestinians have left Gaza since the beginning of the war, according to Palestinian officials. Now, many of them must decide whether to return to the enclave, most of which lies in ruins after two years of Israeli bombardment.
The Israeli government is still refusing to let foreign journalists into Gaza. It argued in a Supreme Court hearing Monday morning that to do so would put Israeli soldiers at risk even though the cease-fire is more than three months old and Israel has allowed international aid workers to enter the territory.
For foreign journalists, Gaza has been off-limits since the start of the war in 2023, except for a small number of reporters invited on carefully controlled, abbreviated visits escorted by Israeli soldiers. A longstanding petition by foreign journalists seeking to report from inside the territory was considered by the Israeli Supreme Court on Monday after numerous delays.
In oral arguments, Justice Ruth Ronnen suggested that the Rafah crossing’s reopening could allow foreign journalists to enter Gaza through Egypt. But a lawyer for the Foreign Press Association, Gilead Sher, argued that the group’s 400 members, who include employees of The New York Times, should be able to enter from Israel, where they are based.
“We see international aid entering daily to the Strip, we see international aid workers and U.N. workers, and Israelis entering,” along with officials of the World Bank, Mr. Sher said, according to a pool report. “But foreign journalists are prohibited.”
A government lawyer, Yonatan Nadav, said that letting journalists into Gaza posed risks to Israeli soldiers, but he agreed to describe those risks only in a closed court session.
A lawyer for the Union of Journalists in Israel, Amir Basha, also spoke in favor of letting foreign journalists into Gaza, arguing that they represented a vital and missing source of independent information, alongside the Israeli military and Palestinian reporters in Gaza.
“No one is arguing with the aid workers’ value,” he said. “But journalists should not be last, they should be first among equals. Because of the information that journalists offer to the public, it cannot be that the Israeli public’s right to know is last in line.”
The Supreme Court did not say when it would issue a ruling.
The Rafah crossing lies near what was once the southern city of Rafah, which was largely razed by Israeli forces.
For the first nine months of the war, tens of thousands of Palestinians were able to flee to Egypt through the crossing. Some were sponsored by international aid groups who coordinated their exit with Israel and Egypt. Many others paid exorbitant bribes to intermediaries connected with the Egyptian government to secure exit papers.
In May 2024, that tenuous escape was cut off as Israeli forces swept along the Gaza side of the border and seized the crossing. Israel and Egypt could not agree on conditions for reopening the border, which has mostly been closed ever since.
The closure cut off a key route for severely ill and wounded Gazans seeking medical treatment outside the enclave’s battered health system. Some Palestinians, such as cancer patients needing chemotherapy, died without access to proper treatment.
The potential for renewed conflict in Gaza is still very much present. Hamas has entrenched its control over half of the enclave, the Israeli military controls the other half, and most people are still huddled in crowded tent camps or in the rubble of half-destroyed homes.
Kamel Ayyad, 53, fled for Egypt in November 2023 with his wife and three daughters. While he said that he hoped to return to Gaza, he noted that most of his friends and acquaintances say that going back now is too risky.
“Gaza’s still experiencing a cold war, or an unofficial war — it’s not stable,” said Mr. Ayyad, an official with St. Porphyrius, a Greek Orthodox church in Gaza. “No one wants to gamble with the lives of their family.”
But it is far from clear how long Gazans will be able to stay in Egypt, which has made clear that their presence ought to be temporary. “We’re between a rock and a hard place,” Mr. Ayyad said.
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